In response to the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, members of the “Progressive Faculty Network” at UNC-Chapel Hill have sponsored a series of “teach-ins” to give an alternative view of the attacks. Entitled the “Understanding” series, the teach-ins are also sponsored by the university’s departments of Political Science and Geography, the University Center for International Studies, and the Carolina Seminar on Bridging the Divide: Academics, Activists, and the Struggle for Social Justice.
Building on Chancellor James Moeser’s call in his “State of the University” address that “we must be willing to take a stand on the critical issues of the day,” the groups have presented a portrait of America after the attacks as a nation clearly deserving the violence inflicted on it. Not surprising, the teach-ins made national news, as such news agencies as Fox News and CNN discussed some of the speakers’ comments.
The teach-ins following closely on the heels of another event in Chapel Hill that made national headlines. The Town of Chapel Hill forcing a restaurant owner to remove a banner from his store proclaiming “God Bless America, Woe to Our Enemies” because several town council members complained about the language being “offensive.” Some commentators speculated over whether Chapel Hill was seeking to become the “new Berkeley.”
There were plenty of comparisons made to Nazis and other totalitarian regimes at the University of North Carolina’s “teach-in” held Sept. 21, but the focus of the comparisons wasn’t Osama bin Laden or terrorists in general, but the United States of America.
The speakers at the forum, “Understanding the Attack on America: An Alternate View,” included William Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. and CIA Intervention since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower; Stan Goff, author of Hideous Dream: A Soldier’s Memoir of the U.S. Invasion of Haiti; Rania Masri, an Arab-American activist and author of Iraq Under Siege; Catherine Lutz, UNC-CH anthropology professor and author of Homefront: A Military City and the American Twentieth Century, Rashmi Varma, UNC-CH English professor; Sarah Shields, a UNC-CH history professor; and Charles Kurzman, a UNC-CH sociology professor.
Blum, whose homepage compares the Nazi holocaust with “the American holocaust,” told the audience that if he were president of the U.S., “I would first apologize to all the widows and orphans, the tortured and the impoverished, and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism.”
Blum also asked if President Bush planned to attack the United States for harboring terrorists and murderers, including “the anti-Castro Cubans in Miami.”
Goff, who recently wrote, as a member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic, that the Hague War Crimes Tribunal was “about covering up the war crimes of the North American Treaty Organization and the US Government,” said that it was wrong to compare the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon to the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The de facto executive branch and the compliant press are putting the historical spotlight right now on December 7, 1941, and Pearl Harbor,” he said. “I think we need to aim that spotlight at February 27 in 1933 and the Reichstag fire.” (In 1933, Nazis under the direction of Chancellor Adolf Hitler reportedly torched the Reichstag to create a panic, blamed the Communists, convinced Weimar Republic President Paul von Hindenburg to suspend constitutional liberties, won a parliamentary plurality and thereby passed the “Enabling Law” giving Hitler dictatorial power.)
Lutz also disputed the Pearl Harbor parallel, saying it should be “February 1947, when a new war was declared,” by which she meant the Cold War (which of course was never formally declared a war). She compared Henry Kissinger with Osama bin Laden, and suggested that we “send the international police for [bin Laden] and pick up Henry Kissinger and Augusto Pinochet on the way home.”
Masri, an Iraq sympathizer with much to say provided the topic isn’t Kuwait or Kurds, said that “anyone who looks different from your typical white man” was being attacked in “the xenophobic sentiment that has taken hold of this country.”
Kurzman suggested the attacks owe to a conspiracy between American “militarists” and the terrorists themselves, to further the militarists’ interests, which lie “in the exaggeration of threats, armed responses, and so on. In fact, I would argue that there is a tacit collusion among the militarists of all sides.”
The crowd, estimated at approximately 700, responded favorably to the speakers’ messages, nodding, applauding, even laughing in agreement. A letter-writer in The Daily Tar Heel reported that one attendee was moved to shout “Bulldoze the Pentagon!”
Audio clips of the first “teach-in” are available at http://www.unc.edu/~oswell, the website of Michelle Oswell, a Ph.D. student in Renaissance musicology at UNC-CH who attended the event.
On Oct. 1, the second teach-in, “What is War? What is Peace?” was held. Invited speakers this time included Curtis Gatewood, president of the Durham, N.C., chapter of the NAACP; David Gilmartin, professor of South Asian history and peace activist at North Carolina State University; Wahneema Lubiano, professor of Literature and African American Studies at Duke University; Elin O’Hara Slavick; professor of art at UNC-CH; and Scott Kirsch, professor of geography at UNC-CH.
According to the DTH, “the audience responded most enthusiastically to” Gatewood. He said he was “certainly opposed to any massive, violent attacks that could possibly kill thousands, if not millions, of innocent people.”
Gatewood was recently disavowed by NAACP President Kweisi Mfume for his remarks following the Sept. 11 attacks. Gatewood urged that blacks should not fight for their country, because they would only return to America to “be discriminated against by people whose businesses were headquartered in the World Trade Center. This is not the time to sacrifice our fathers, sons, and brothers to a country that has not protected our rights.”
In 1995 Gatewood proposed that blacks boycott Santa Claus, and in 1998 he called on Duke University to change its “Blue Devil” mascot. He said Christmas put black families in debt, and that Duke’s mascot was “spiritually insensitive” and had connotations of European aristocracy and the “blue-eyed devils” of white racists.
Gatewood was also slated to speak at the next teach-in.
Slavick used the teach-in to present a slide-show of her artwork, entitled “Places the United States Has Bombed.” According to the DTH, “the artwork depicted devastation and destruction that was a result of the United States bombing places such as Sudan and Afghanistan.”
“I want to instill fear back into us,” Slavick said, “but not fear of the peripheral world. We should be afraid of ourselves.”
Lubiano last spoke at UNC-CH in a conference in April, “Black Queer Studies in the Millennium,” in which she gave the closing remarks. She has previously written that “I don’t care about, wouldn’t talk with, and am not interested in making common cause with them” — meaning “political conservatives (or the Right).” She has also stated that it is impossible “to draw whites into” multiculturalism, that “white males are right not to feel good about [multiculturalism].” To her, multicul-turalism is not “about the liberal toleration of difference, but about the contestation of differences.”
Lubiano has also written that “my critical thinking finds resonance in and with Marxism as well as feminist theory, black radicalism, queer theory, various discourses about post-structuralism, and the often tension-filled spaces around and within each of those rubrics.”
Her remarks were well in keeping with those sentiments. The first circumstance that she mentions that “work[s] against peace” in the U.S. is “the circulation of state-supported terror in the form of white supremacist vigilante terror — lynchings — that continued until the middle of the 20th century.” She denounced the actions of the U.S. in response to the attacks, saying “this is U.S. war-mongering as terror.” To her, peace “requires internationalist consciousness” and “dismantling the unquestioned commonsense of capitalism,” among other things.
Kirsch spoke briefly about the necessity “for progressives and liberals especially to start imagining viable alternatives to the war on terrorism.”
“I agree with many here that a sustained peace movement is essential as well,” Kirsch said.
After the speakers presented their comments, the teach-in broke up into several small workshops. They were: “U.S. Foreign Policy,” “Civil Rights in Time of War,” “Action Through Non-Violence,” “How to Organize Actions Against War,” “The Role of Armed Resistance,” “Community, Networking, and Outreach,” “Visual Strategies for Peace During War,” and “Arguments for Peace.”
On Oct. 4, the Campus Y, the Division of Student Affairs, and Sangam (a South Asian awareness group) brought Arun Ghandi to speak. Ghandi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, reiterated his call for a nonviolent response to the attacks on New York and Washington that he had made earlier in an online essay. “We must acknowledge our role in helping to create monsters in the world, find ways to contain these monsters without hurting more innocent people and then redefine our role in the world,” he had written. Ghandi was also invited to speak at N.C. State the next day.